Catalina Island

Avalon · California · United States

Catalina Island rises from the Pacific Ocean roughly 35 kilometres off the coast of Southern California, a rugged island of steep canyons and scrubby hillsides that conceals some of the finest temperate diving on the American West Coast. The island's centrepiece for divers is Casino Point Dive Park in Avalon, California's first underwater park, established in 1962 and protected from all fishing and collecting ever since. Decades of protection have created a marine ecosystem so rich it feels like diving in an aquarium, except everything here is wild, thriving, and on a scale that the mainland coast lost long ago. I entered the water from the concrete steps at Casino Point on a September morning with the sun already warming the air. Below the surface, giant kelp fronds rose from the rocky bottom in dense columns, their amber canopy filtering the California sunlight into a shifting mosaic of gold and green. Diving through a mature kelp forest is one of the great experiences in temperate water diving, the visual equivalent of walking through a gothic cathedral with living, swaying pillars. Garibaldi were everywhere, California's state fish blazing like orange lanterns against the green backdrop. These fiercely territorial damselfish are fully protected, and at Casino Point they have zero fear of divers, holding their ground and even approaching to investigate. California sheephead cruised the rocks in their striking pink and black livery, and moray eels threaded through the boulder fields. Horn sharks, small and beautifully patterned, rested in crevices on the sand, their spiral egg cases wedged into rock cracks. The deeper sections of the park, below twenty metres, opened onto sand channels between rocky ridges where bat rays glided over the bottom and spiny lobsters peered from every hole. Then, at the edge of the kelp forest, a shape materialised that made me stop finning and simply stare: a giant black sea bass, easily two metres long and thick as a barrel, hovering in the water column with an ancient, unhurried calm.